13 Answers

No.
The clown I grew up with was Ronald McDonald. Other than being a little too obvious about his commercial intentions, he was not creepy.
I am not Catholic, so I never really knew a priest.
I was in the Cub Scouts, and our Den leader was a woman. I know that these days a few young female teachers like to fuck their middle school and high school boys, but nothing like that happened when I was in the Cub Scouts.
Ventriloquist??
The people in that town notwithstanding, everything I encountered was pretty much standard shit.

A local man used to dress up as the Easter Bunny and give out chocolate eggs at park here in my town. It was a yearly thing put on by the city. Not long after he quit, he was charged with child molestation and having child pornography.

Most priests give me the creeps, but I don’t think it’s necessarily my instincts trying to tell me something. I think that I just have a lot of negative associations with priests and church from my childhood, and now I just tend to be uneasy around all of them. Then again, my family is Catholic, so you never can be too sure… the Catholic church doesn’t exactly have a sparkling reputation in that department.
I am not afraid of clowns or puppets, so I can’t think of a time that I felt weirded out by one – but if I get a negative feeling from anyone I take it seriously. I really believe that my gut knows more about that sort of thing than I consciously do.

Let’s see. Where will child molestors want to work? Surely not around children! No, they would work in places with no access to children. After all, that would be the surest way to frustrate themselves.

Of course we are going to find that child molestors take jobs that put them in contact with children. We will not find them doing underwater welding. Or space station maintenance. There really aren’t a lot of kids up in space stations.

So, given that child molestors probably aren’t all that dumb, they are going to try to find jobs that give them more contact with children. Similarly, when we find a child molester, they will probably have a job that puts them near children. There should be no big surprise here.

Personally, I was never very fond of children. They scared me more than clowns and whatnot did. So until I had children of my own, I didn’t hang around places where there were children. And even when I did have children, I spent as little time in children places as I could because, sue me, I don’t like children’s activities. I don’t like talking in a high voice. I don’t like making fart jokes. I don’t really like thinking like a kid.

My children, therefore, probably had to put up with more adult stuff than most kids do. I did not respond well to high pitched screaming, and stopped that one right away. With a lesson and a challenge, mind you.

So no, I didn’t get creepy vibes from the people you mentioned. There was one thing that worried me. That was the the young man who worked in the daycare center. Why is a young man working with children, I wondered? But I got to know him, and came to trust him, and he became one of the kids favorite babysitters.

Oops. I lied. There are a number of women I know, but one in particular, who does the kid act thing. She’s a mime, actually. And she weirds me out. Her emotions don’t seem right, and she’s always talking in a high pitched voice (not during her act), like she’s a kid. Turns out she had a bit of abuse as a child. She married someone twice her age (she is, of course, much closer to him in age now) which was considered strange. I don’t really trust her, but I don’t think (and really hope) that she wouldn’t hurt a child. She didn’t want to have a child, but her husband convinced her to have one. I hope she’s found she’s a better mother than she thought she’d be.